Gish Jen’s 10th glorious book, Bad Bad Girl, grapples with her complicated relationship with her mother, deploying the comic, gut-wrenching patience of those who have endured narcissistic parents.
Not strictly a memoir, this novel remembers Jen’s painful upbringing as an unloved second child. Her mother, Agnes (born Loo Shu-hsin), had withheld much of her past. Jen must forge her own fiction from the correspondence she uncovers. But she is not alone in this process.
As she writes, her mother returns from the dead to proffer pithy comments that both challenge and support Jen’s rendition of the past. The narrative peers into Agnes’s luxurious childhood in 1930s Shanghai. As a girl, she irks her family with a brightness that is unsuitable for a young lady, and not desirable to a husband.
After the horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese war, Agnes determines to study in New York. As China’s revolution unfolds, she is haunted by her relatives’ bitter letters across the ocean. Marrying a fellow student, Norman, Agnes becomes pregnant, discarding her dream of completing a PhD. While she feels blessed by a first son, she resents her second child of five – Jen.
Just as Agnes was belittled by her own mother, she too scapegoats her daughter. Happily, Jen breaks out of this cycle. As a successful author, she writes a new path ahead, without sacrificing her own children into the bargain. In this redemptive book, Jen has found a means to mourn the mother she could have had – and to honour the matriarch she survived.
Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen is out now (Granta, £18.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
